RE: use of character entities (was: Re: Joint meeting at TPAC from HTML and i18n core WG minutes 2007-11-09)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-core-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-i18n-core-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Martin Duerst
> Sent: 20 November 2007 06:13

...

> >   Ishida explain that this part of charmod is about best practices
> >
> >   it's not should in the normative sense
> 
> Richard, where did you get this from? The character model is 
> very clear about what SHOULD means. It's used in the IETF 
> sense, and it means: do it unless you have a good reason not to do it.
> 
> What is true is that the Character Model tends to err on the 
> side of strictness rather than lazyness in some cases. The 
> world may not collapse if you happen to occasionally ignore a 
> SHOULD. But then, that's why it's a SHOULD, not a MUST.

I agree with what you say, and I hope that most of the people in the meeting
understood the same thing from what I said there.  It could be that I
expressed it badly, but I looked at the transcript and it became more vague
towards the end (where this was said) and I think it misrepresented what I
was trying to say.

For the record, note that we are talking about C047
http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#C047


> I think that on this issue, Bjoern Hoermann once theatened to 
> create something like a validator that would produce an error 
> message for each and every 'clear' character encoded as an entity.
> 
> This would of course be very bad usability design. For users, 
> it would first be much better if this produced a warning, not 
> an error (after all, it's just a SHOULD), and second, if the 
> message was aggregated
> ("Warning: 200 unnecessary character entities detected, you 
> may want to change them to actual characters (e.g. ꯍ -> @@).").
> 
> 
> >   Elika: Maybe you should go through the document and change the
> >   wording of should sentences that don't match RFC2119 to something
> >   else
> >
> >   Ishida: Well, we mean it that way for authors. Maybe we need to
> >   create different classes and explain which 
> recommendations apply to
> >   which
> 
> We already have these classes, don't we? That's the [S], [I], 
> [C] indicators, or not? Of course, if we really got any of 
> these wrong in Charmod fundamentals, we should fix it, but 
> first, please check seriously whether there actually is a 
> problem or not.

Yes. I agree.  Again, I don't think that what is in the minutes here
reflects what I think I said, or at least what I wanted to say.



RI


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 18:13:36 UTC